“He’ll come round wi’ his face to the judgment,” she said; and I left her standing by the bedside and hurried from the house. Leaving the yard, I turned sharply round upon the bridge. The storm had yielded, but the ground was yet thickly strewed with white. Not a soul seemed to be abroad. Only low down against the parapet of the bridge was a single living thing, and it crouched huddled as if the storm had claimed a victim before it passed. My brain still burned with fury over the foul action that had so nearly sent me from my father in his utmost need. I could think of nothing at the moment but revenge, of nothing but that I must sweep this horror into the river before I could hope to deal collectedly with the fatality that had befallen me. I only feared that it would escape me, and leaped on it, mad with rage. I tore him up to his feet and held him from me with a savage gaze, and he looked at me with a dark, amazed stare, but there was no terror in his eyes. And even as I held him I saw in the dim lamplight how worn and haggard he had grown, how sunken was his white face, how fearfully the monomania of revenge had rent him with its jagged teeth. “You dog!” I said. “You end in the millrace here--do you understand? You are a murderer in will and would have been in deed if your aim had answered true to your devil’s heart! Down with you!” I closed with him, but he still struggled to hold me off. “I thought it was he--the other. He’s left London. He must be here somewhere.” There was no deprecation in his tone. He spoke in a small dry voice and with an air as if none could doubt that he was justified in his pursuit and must stand aside or suffer by it rather than that it should cease. “Where he is I neither know nor care,” I answered, set and stern. “You’ve raised your hand to me at last, dog that you are, and that’s my concern. I should have known at first--that it’s useless arguing mercy with a devil.” I had my arms round him like steel bands. Once he might have been my match, or better, but not now in his state of physical degeneration. “Yes, end it,” he whispered. “I always thought to die by water as she did. The chase here is exhausting me. I can finish my task more effectively from the other side the grave.” I gave a mocking laugh. “You shall purge your hate in fire, there,” I said. “Ghostly revenge on the living is an old wives’ tale.” He struggled to force an arm free and pointed down at the foaming mill-tail. “There’s a voice there,” he cried, “that says otherwise. I read it, and so do you, for all your shaking heroics. Fling me down! I escape the self-destruction that was to come. Fling me down and end it!” I tightened my arms about him. The first desperate fury of my mood was leading me and with it the impulse to murder. The wan, once-dear features were appealing to me against their will and mine.